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Late-night hosts discussed – or ignored – Donald Trump’s surprise primetime address and dug further into the explosive new interview the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles.
Jimmy Kimmel
Jimmy Kimmel opened his Wednesday night show with an acknowledgment of the president’s 9pm ET national address, also known as a “surprise primetime episode of The Worst Wing tonight on every channel”.
Trump announced only on Tuesday that he would deliver an impromptu fireside chat during the season finales of Survivor and The Floor. “It’s weird to think that had a couple of states just gone the other way, he’d be hosting one of those shows,” Kimmel joked. “Trump shouldn’t be pre-empting The Floor. He should be mopping it.”
In a Truth Social post hyping up the address – subject unknown – Trump promised: “It has been a great year for our country, and THE BEST IS YET TO COME!”
“I agree – the Epstein files are due on Friday,” Kimmel quipped. “Basically, the speech tonight was taking the stand in his own defense. It was opening statements.
“It really is amazing that this fool is president.”
In other Trump news, the president recently unveiled a new “presidential hall of fame” in the White House, featuring highly politicized plaques offering a Maga interpretation of history: that Barack Obama passed the “‘Unaffordable’ Care Act” and was “one of the most divisive political figures in American history”; that Joe Biden, represented only by an autopen, was “dominated by his Radical Left handlers”; and that Ronald Reagan was “a fan of President Donald J Trump long before President Trump’s Historic run for the White House”.
Reagan, as Kimmel reminded, died in 2004 and was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease a decade before that. “What was he a fan of, exactly? Trump’s Pizza Hut commercials?” Kimmel wondered. “What a sad individual this is. He knows, deep down, deep down in the pit where his soul should be, in that pot where all the undigested chicken and off-brand Sudafed piles up, he knows that no one respects him. He knows they all just want something from him. And he knows the world is laughing at him, and that his brain and face are like a Creamsicle melting on the sidewalk.
“It takes a special kind of lunatic to get his insults cast in bronze,” he concluded. “Can we please put this man in a home before he completely destroys the one he’s in now?”
Stephen Colbert
On the Late Show, Stephen Colbert tried his best to avoid talking about the 9pm “old grandpa ramble-pants sundown jamboree”.
“We talked about doing the show live tonight to cover the speech,” he told his studio audience, but decided not to “because – and just to give you a little peek behind the showbiz curtain – we would have to have watched it. And I don’t want to do that no more.”
Colbert took issue with Trump announcing the speech “out of nowhere” with the promise that “the best is yet to come!”
“OK … kind of a mixed signal to announce an emergency national address because everything’s going great,” Colbert said. “It’s like your mom calling and saying: ‘Hey honey, I know you’ve got work, but is there any way you could fly down here tomorrow? Because your dad … is doing great!’
“It’s a really big deal for networks to just hand over their primetime slots on such short notice,” he added, “especially because here, at CBS, his 9pm speech cuts right into the middle of the three-hour Survivor season finale. Unless that’s the final challenge – ‘Survivors, you’ve endured starvation, extreme heat and poisonous snakes. But for your final challenge, you must listen to a bitter old man talk about a ballroom.’”
Seth Meyers
And on Late Night, Seth Meyers checked in on a White House in “damage control” mode after the chief of staff, Susie Wiles, gave a series of highly candid interviews to Vanity Fair.
Among other things, Wiles said Trump had an “alcoholic’s personality”, referred to JD Vance as a “conspiracy theorist for a decade” and called Elon Musk an “avowed ketamine user”.
Meyers claimed it was “weird” and “in many ways, it’s not surprising” that Wiles said such things, other than the fact that she remains working at the White House. “She said the president she currently works for behaves like an alcoholic, the vice-president is a conspiracy theorist and the most likely explanation for the ramblings of the richest man on Earth is that he’s on drugs,” Meyers laughed.
Wiles also defended Trump’s friendship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, because they were “young, you know, sort of young, single, whatever – I know it’s a passé word but sort of young, single playboys together”.
“I didn’t think it was possible to make Trump’s relationship with Epstein sound any worse, but Susie Wiles did it,” said Meyers. “You’re not helping Trump’s case by saying he and Epstein were playboys together. That’s like saying, ‘Oh yeah, I was friends with Hannibal Lecter, but only because we’re both foodies!’”
Meyers also mocked the article’s accompanying photoshoot, which featured high-ranking cabinet members, including Vance, along with Wiles in the West Wing.
“They all thought they were going to look so cool, and while they were posing for these glossy photos, their colleague was bad-mouthing them,” Meyers laughed. “This is like if you pose for a high-school yearbook photo thinking you’ve been voted ‘most likely to succeed’, and then when it came out, your superlative said ‘most likely to shit his pants at lunch’.”
